Five Insights for Building Trust in the Cloud

It takes little more than 15 minutes and a credit card to purchase and set up a cloud solution, making it an easy workaround for business executives that too often hear "no" from their IT functions. In large organizations, the proliferation of this phenomenon without IT oversight creates growing security, privacy and financial risks to the organization.

Even those organizations that have adopted cloud services are exposed. Often, there is a gap between the controls typically implemented in the cloud and the controls necessary to create a secure, trusted and audit-ready cloud environment.

Not that long ago, cloud computing was little more than a speck on the horizon. We heard reports of it rapidly becoming a mainstream technology, but it had yet to make a meaningful impact on our technology landscape. According to EY's Global Information Security Survey, in 2010, 30 percent of respondents indicated that their organization used or was planning to use cloud computing-based services. In 2011, the percentage had risen to 44 percent. By 2012, cloud computing had reached a technological tipping point: Almost 60 percent of survey respondents said their organization was using or planned to use cloud computing services. And yet, 38 percent of respondents said that they had not taken any measures to mitigate the risks of using cloud computing services. This disruptive technology was advancing faster than many could secure it.

A more recent Forrester Research report suggests that for 73 percent of surveyed businesses in Europe and North America, security remains a major concern when considering cloud computing.

One of the first principles of improving information security is taking control of your environment. It would therefore feel counterintuitive for an organization to surrender control of its IT infrastructure and data to a third party. And yet this approach may offer the best opportunity to address increasingly complex security and privacy challenges. Rather than becoming an organization's worst security nightmare, cloud computing platforms may offer its best hope to create a more secure IT environment by strengthening controls and improving information and security capabilities.

Here are the top 10 strategic technology trends that will impact most organizations in 2017. Strategic technology trends are defined as those with substantial disruptive potential or those reaching the tipping point over the next five years. ... More >>